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Micro-Star
International's MS-6163 Pro
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days there are a new breed of motherboards being brought to market
by a few key manufacturers that are designed with the hardcore
"overclocker' in mind. Micro-Star
International sent
us their crowned jewel in this exciting new arena, the MS-6163 Rev.
2.0, otherwise know as the MS-6163 Pro. Here's what we thought. |
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The
Specs
- CPU:
Support Intel(R) Pentium(R) II/III & CeleronTM processor up
to 550MHz or faster.
- F.S.B.
supports
66/75/78/81/83/90/95/100/105/110/112/115/117/120/122/124(31)
124(41)/126/133/135/138/140/142/144/150/155MHz 26 settings.
- Vcore
adjustment: Up to 15%
- Vio
adjustment: 3.3/3.4/3.5/3.6v
- Memory: 3
DIMM. Max. 768MB SDRAM (Supports ECC)
- I/O: 2
Serial, 1 Printer, 2 USB, Floppy, IrDA, Audio, Game
- Slot: 5
PCI, 2 ISA, 1 AGP
- Audio:
Creative(R) ES1373 (Optional)
- BIOS: CPU
Plug & Play, Voltage and Bus Frequency/Ratio Setting, ACPI,
DMI,
- PnP Green,
PC 97/98
- TOP Tech.
III (Optional)
- System
Hardware Monitor (Winbond 782, Optional)
- CPU Plug
& Play III
- CPU Core
Voltage Adjustable
- PCI
Chipset Core Voltage Adjustable
- PC Alert
II
- SoftCooler
II
- 3D! Turbo
II
- F. Factor:
ATX
- LAN Wake
Up Function
- Modem(Internal/External)
Ring Wake Up Function
- Keyboard
Power On Feature
- Diagnostic
LEDs
- STR
(Suspend to RAM) (Optional)
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The
MS-6163 Pro has some pretty unique features. There are 4 Diagnostic
LEDs on the board which, depending on the state they are in, tell
you what is happening with your system. Hopefully you'll see the
happy quartet of LEDs all shining brightly. If you see some other
combination, then all you have to do is look at the error table in
the user manual to see what your problem is.
Also, something I have never seen before is the Chipset
Voltage Adjust.
In addition to CPU Core Voltage adjustments, you can actually boost
the Intel BX Northbridge chipset voltage to 3.4, 3.5 and 3.6V if you
want. I played with this a little but didn't see any benefit in my
system. You may find it settles things down a little. I am not sure
on this however.
One small note of caution. The BIOS, while it is jam packed full of
additional features, does not have the ability to set the AGP
multiplier/clock division from the FSB speed. As a result, I am not
sure what the AGP clock was that we tested the board at based on our
124 MHz. FSB. It does have the ability to select various PCI clocks
however. Regardless, this may or may not affect overclocking of your
system if the video card you are running can't handle the speed of
the FSB setting.
Finally, MSI
really packs in some cool software with the MS-6163 Pro. Take a look
at PC Alert and 3D! Turbo II! |
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3D
Turbo (click images)
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PC
Alert (click for larger view)
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While PC Alert
is nothing too innovative beyond the usual hardware monitoring
package, it does do a nice job of keeping tabs on your board. Yes,
those temps are high there aren't they. We
are used a Peltier Cooled P3-450 for testing and it really puts out
the summer winds.
3D Turbo on the
other hand is a really nice utility! This is the first time I have
seen a Motherboard Manufacturer bundle a Video Card Tweaking/Overclocking
Utility in with the package! It worked like a charm with the TNT2
card we used but would only tweak the image properties of a V3. for
some reason, it didn't know what to do with the V3 core clocks.
Testing
- Don't just sit there, crank it up!
(Our
Test System)
Full
Tower ATX Case w/ 300W PS, Pentium3 -450 Overclocked to 558 MHz. MSI
MS-6163 Rev 2.0 Motherboard, 128MB of PC100 CAS2 RAM, IBM Deskstar
10GXP 10GB 7200 RPM EIDE UDMA Hard Drive, Leadtek Winfast S320II w/
32MB, Toshiba SDM1202 3rd. Gen. 4.8X DVD/32X CDROM, Win 98, DirectX
6.1, Nividia Reference Drivers V2.08
So we fired this
bad boy up and here's how it did!
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ZD
Winbench 99
(click
for larger view)
The numbers
speak for themselves. These are hands down THE best Application
Benchmark numbers we have seen to date from our P3-450 overclocked @
558MHz. The CPU/FPU numbers are in line with others in it class.
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Wintune
| CPU |
(1)
Intel Pentium III@558 MHz |
| Video
Board |
NVIDIA
RIVA TNT2 |
| Video
Mode |
1024x768@16bits/pixel |
| RAM |
128
MB |
| OS |
Windows
98 4.10.1998 |
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Area
Tested
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Value
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| CPU
Integer |
1620.223
MIPS |
| CPU
Floating Point |
646.3247
MFLOPS |
| Video(2D) |
120.9534
MPixels/s |
| Direct3D |
158.8012
MPixels/s |
| OpenGL |
132.5097
MPixels/s |
| Memory |
949.4211
MB/s |
| Cached
Disk |
104.292
MB/s |
| Uncached
Disk |
3.141145
MB/s |
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Once again, top
notch performance!
Stability
One area that
this board really excels in is stability. For over a month now, we
have been running our P3-450 @ 558 MHZ. in various other BX boards.
In order to do this, we had to boost the core voltage of the CPU to
at least 2.1V. The MS-6163 Pro handled 558 MHz. and let our
overworked and under paid CPU stay at default voltage. This was a
great testament to its design and quality.
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And
the Survey says!!!
The
Micro-Star
International
MS-6163 Pro gets a Hot Hardware Temp-O-Meter rating of...
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93 !!! Get
out the Oven Mitts Alice!
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